Key Takeaways:
- Gomining launched GoBTC at Consensus Miami in May 2026, targeting 12-hour BTC settlement at a 0.2% fee.
- The 0.2% merchant fee undercuts card processors charging 1.5–3.5%, with fees split between wallets and miners.
- Any wallet provider can integrate GoBTC; Gomining is dedicating a mining pool to confirm its transactions.
What GoBTC Is
At checkout, GoBTC gives merchants instant authorization, meaning transactions register in real time. Onchain settlement on the Bitcoin network finalizes within 12 hours, using Bitcoin’s base layer directly rather than routing through a sidechain, payment channel, or intermediary custodian.
The protocol is non-custodial and free for users, and merchants pay a flat 0.2% fee, split evenly between wallet providers and bitcoin miners. For context, traditional card processors charge between 1.5% and 3.5% per transaction.
GoBTC is open infrastructure meaning that any wallet provider can integrate the protocol, and Gomining is dedicating a specific mining pool to confirming GoBTC transactions, giving the payment layer dedicated block space without competing with standard bitcoin traffic. The company is targeting full 12-hour onchain settlement across the system by the end of 2026.
Why Now?
Bitcoin’s whitepaper, published 17 years ago, described the network as a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” By most measures, that vision has remained elusive in daily commerce because in the U.S., only around 2,300 businesses accept bitcoin directly, despite 22% of American adults owning it.
The Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s primary payment layer, introduced in 2018 to solve this, took seven years to reach $1 billion in monthly volume. And, while Lightning has since made genuine progress, processing $1.17 billion in volume in November 2025 and over 12 million monthly transactions as of 2026, its routing complexity and limited merchant adoption have kept widespread use at bay.
GoBTC takes a different architectural bet wherein it settles directly onchain using Bitcoin’s block confirmation mechanism, with Gomining’s mining infrastructure absorbing the settlement latency. Whether the model scales past early integrations will depend on wallet provider uptake and how merchants respond to authorization-before-settlement timing.
For Gomining, the launch marks an expansion beyond its mining-as-a-service roots into the payments infrastructure layer, a bet that the company best positioned to confirm Bitcoin transactions is also the one best placed to settle them.
